Plato at the Googleplex

Why Philosophy Won't Go Away

By Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

(Pantheon; 459 pages; $29.95)

This isn't your professor's philosophy book. By her own count, MacArthur Fellow Rebecca Newberger Goldstein breaks at least one cardinal rule of the academy in her remarkably alive, ruminative new work, "Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away." "I was trained as a philosopher never to put philosophers and their ideas into historical contexts," she writes, "since historical context has nothing to do with the validity of the philosopher's positions."

That may be true. But because Goldstein thinks philosophy's "story is far more interesting than that," "Plato at the Googleplex" delivers loads of colorful, fascinating ancient historical context. You'll get a thorough lesson in the culture and politics of Socrates' Athens, for example, and you'll learn about how, at least according to one philosopher, all moral and religious thought can be traced to a period between 800 and 200 B.C.E. known as the Axial Age.

But then the author - who confesses here that she was "addicted to science fiction" as a child and is now known for what another critic once called her "distinctive fusion of narrative and intellectual debate" - kicks the unorthodoxy up a notch. She gets unreal. Through a series of five fictional "dialogues," Goldstein imagines what it would be like if Plato were dropped into our context in the 21st century.

This gives us several delicious scenes. Plato stops at Google headquarters on his book tour, where he's mesmerized by the idea of crowd-sourced knowledge. Later, he's onstage with a couple of "child rearing experts" at Manhattan's 92nd Street Y prescribing how to identify exceptional children. And as an expert consultant for Margo Howard's advice column, Plato counsels a woman who finds herself drawn to a VBB (a very bad boy). "Last, let her think on this," Plato offers, "that though love is a profound disturbance, not all profound disturbances are love."

In perhaps the book's most absorbing dialogue, Plato is a guest on a cleverly drawn conservative talk news show called "The No Bull Bin" hosted by one Roy McCoy, an obvious stand-in for Fox News' Bill O'Reilly. "I've had some of the scientists here in the No Bull Bin when they were hawking their atheist books, and they made a poor showing of themselves," McCoy says. "I haven't been able to get a single one of them to even explain to me how you get the tides to work without the Deity stepping in to keep it all going." Unfortunately, this dialogue shows, even the most enlightened can't budge the ones who insist on remaining in the dark.

What Goldstein is after in all this is whether or not the field of philosophy has progressed. We'd like to think that it has, of course, but if an ancient Greek can wander into anything like a modern-day seminar and run the table, perhaps none of us has come as far as we'd like to think.

"All this sounds pretty speculative," you say. The author might agree. At one point, in fact, she gleefully points out that she's "wildly speculating" in her attempt to explain why the ancient Greeks believed that only extraordinary lives were worth living. But even if it is, this is speculation informed by a lifetime of learning and infused with an abiding passion for this stuff.

"Truth seeing comes from the violent activity of philosophy," the author writes early in the book, "a drama enacted deep in the interior of each of us and which manages, in its violence, to deprive us of positions that may be so deeply and constitutively personal that we can't defend them to others."

The writing in the expository chapters of "Plato at the Googleplex" can get discursive, but this probably won't surprise anyone who's ever taken a college-level philosophy course. To wit: "Goodness is interwoven with truth because the explanation for the truth is that the truth is determined by the best reason, and the best reason works all on its own - which itself is as good as it gets."

But more often than not, Goldstein writes with verve and directness. For instance, she describes the theory behind Plato's anticipation of the prisoner's dilemma in the "Republic" like this: "In order to avoid getting maximally screwed a rational person will forsake the chance of maximally screwing."

Does the fact that "Plato at the Googleplex" is fun - and at times wickedly funny, as when the author compares philosophers to "premature ejaculators who pose questions too embarrassingly soon, spilling their seminal genius to no effect" - mean that it's merely amusing? Goldstein perhaps thinks Plato would say no. "A child's natural form of behavior is to play," she has him claim at the 92nd Street Y, "and in our aim to educate, play should be honored and preserved for as long past childhood as can be."

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